I have a tool on my website that gets about 250k unique views per day. During COVID I decided to put a single ad on the page to try to make up for my wife's lost income. It was for a time bringing in close to $500 a month, and was a nice little side income.
My wife never returned to work, we had kids and she has stayed at home with them. As such the ad has stayed up. Last I checked though it is bringing in something like $36 a month despite traffic being higher than ever. I get a payout from Google every couple months.
I'm considering taking it down just because the payoff is so low. It's honestly barely breaking even with the added expense of complicating my taxes.
Slightly off-topic, but several small-to-medium Youtube channels I watch, mentioned that their yearly Youtube earnings are way down, by two-thirds in one case. It may be that Alphabet is dialing back their profit sharing - across the board.
That is true i'm sure. But in this particular case, there is no search or AI directly involved. It's the ads that get inserted to Youtube videos, and what they pay to creators.
Creator-led channels are competing with AI-generated video channels that pump out many videos every day. The ad spend hasn't increased but now it's shared with people who have automated their channel's content production and who are likely getting the majority of what's available.
That's to be expected. Google needs that money to fund the AI development that will enable them to replace creators with their own slop, allowing them to pocket 100 % instead of sharing anything at all.
Exactly, it is already a pattern that Google will start paying good money for ads and then progressively reduce the pay to its publishers. It is a bait and switch strategy, but they'll certainly say that it is just an algorithm improvement....
Totally an organic and transparent marketplace that joins together publishers and consumers huh?
It has been down since the COVID boom for obvious reasons, and then it has gone even more.. Google needing the billions to put into the AI burner is just and unfortunate coincidence..
I had a similar setup a few years back, initially I got a small amount of revenue, but over time things really dropped off.
Despite increasing visitors I was getting less and less income from the adverts, so I too chose to disable them.
I knew it was coming, because even ten years ago I was running an adblocker for myself, but it was still a surprise how quickly it came about for the average Joe.
The problem was in the early 2000s it was basically accepted x86 was a dead end whose days were numbered.
Itanium was the heir apparent but importantly basically vaporware. How do you develop software NOW and more importantly sell and ship software NOW that'll work on a CPU you don't have access to and for which good compilers don't really exist yet? I remind you in the days where online updates were a luxury at best.
Processor agnostic CIL/JIT code was the prescribed solution at the time. Java had lit the way, and it was the only "clear" path forward for better or worse.
Little did we know Itanium would implode, and x86-64 would rise and give 20+ more years of binary compatibility.
Social media left me. I at one time had a decent following on Twitter, just under a thousand people. I could post something I was pondering about and get a whole handful of peoples opinions.
I once pondered why Apple wouldn't distribute their iPhone updates peer-to-peer and got multiple network engineers far more knowledgeable than me discussing why that would be a bad idea.
It was fun and genuinely social. My following on what is now X has halved in number after the Musk acquisition, but cut far deeper in reality. When I do find myself compelled to post on X, I have two former colleagues that heart and occasionally reply. This is the extent of the interactions I have on the platform.
I created an account on Bluesky account but in my several years of largely shadowing my X posts on Bluesky I've amassed all of twenty followers.
Talking to a friend about it, I was basically told I was doing social media wrong. No one cares about "dude wonders about tech" posts anymore. Fine I guess. I never really sought a following, it just kind of happened.
X in particular I find only really boosts big creators, whatever Twitters discovery algorithm was where I would find interesting posts by people with a couple followers is long gone.
Instagram and Facebook, once places I'd reserved for friends are now just ghost towns trying to fake life with AI slop.
I miss social media, I miss having genuinely deep discussions with people I did not know over shared interests. None of the current providers seem interested in providing an outlet for this.
I feel I suspect a similar grief over not being perceived as the author, but it wasn't really of my choosing.
I feel like this fails to consider my own valuing of my time.
Free Chocolate? Sure.
13¢ chocolate? I've gotta try to make change? An awkward amount no less. 3 pennies? They are getting hard to come by. I didn't even want a chocolate. I don't have any cash on me. Do you take card?
For instance, when I'm buying something off Facebook marketplace, if the items not a multiple of $20 bills and $50 bills, the denominations I can get from the ATM, I'm far less likely to buy it because I have to stop somewhere else on my way to the seller and try and make change. It's a pain in the butt.
I have literally overpaid for things from marketplace by a dollar or two to avoid making change.
But if my only options are 1¢ chocolate versus 13¢ chocolate, those are on way closer footing because either way I have to dig my wallet out.
I'd still take the Hershey kiss though because it tastes better.
Sorry I'm from Sweden and our banks have a service called Swish where we can send money on the phone. Paying in cash is extremely uncommon now a days. Every time I've bought or sold something on FB Marketplace the last decade I've used Swish. I thought you had something similar called Venmo in the US?
The problem in the US is too many options. In the US, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle and CashApp are all pretty popular. And there are others.
They’re easy if the one you use is the same one the other person is using. If you’re a Venmo person and you want to transact with a CashApp person, well one of you have to download and set up a new payment app or pay cash.
Some people will want cash for in person transactions but it's more rare. In the US you run into a lot of people who don't trust phones, technology, tech companies, the government, or any other number of reasons to demand physical payments.
> Some people will want cash for in person transactions but it's more rare. In the US you run into a lot of people who don't trust phones, technology, tech companies, the government
No, it's because majority of digital payment systems can be abused. Stolen accounts, payment disputes and more can cause a seller to lose the item and the money.
Cash is very, very hard to counterfeit, and there's inexpensive devices[1] to virtually guarantee a bill is genuine. There's no post-transaction fraud scheme that works once cash had exchanged hands.
> There's no post-transaction fraud scheme that works once cash had exchanged hands.
Yes but it is vulnerable to other fraud schemes, like misrepresentation or theft.
But yeah, when faced with the possibility of fraud many people instinctively retreat from the unknown (technology) to the easily understood realities of cold hard cash. Its biggest advantage is ease of understanding.
I assert it's more than that. Even Zelle can be susceptible to post-transaction fraud schemes.
Yes, someone can steal your cash - but they can also steal your item.
Setting aside theft - cash is simply the most secure way to ensure you keep your money post-transaction. There is no fraud mechanism to abuse, and no way to reclaim cash once in-hand.
For anything of value, the "old school" rules of meeting in a very public place and only accepting cash are still really sound.
Of course there is fraud risk with cash, it is just all on the buyers end of the transaction.
People are still getting scammed with cash every day with fake/locked/misrepresented/stolen items being sold on marketplace sites.
All of the legitimate reasons to reverse a reversible transaction is a fraud vector that cash is vulnerable to. That’s why reversible transactions exist.
> fake/locked/misrepresented/stolen items being sold on marketplace sites
100% of the risks you mention are still true with digital transactions. The difference is with cash, you close the door on literal fraudulent transaction claims or stolen accounts. It's vastly safer than digital transactions for in-person sales.
To be blunt - with cash, the buyer can't go home and file an unauthorized/fraud complaint with anyone - the seller has cash-in-hand, is anonymous, and the transaction is non-reversible. That's a benefit for these types of transactions, and one you seem to be overlooking.
If you're selling your couch on Facebook Marketplace - cash is king.
Since the government and corporations aggressively spy on everyone, and since government programs are often incompetent or overfunded or underfunded or corrupted or evil, there is (justly) little faith in the government.
Cash works fine. It can't be censored easily, it can't be tracked easily. ATMs have it.
Venmo isn't really something I'd consider a "bank service"; it was its own company for a bit, and I think now it's owned by PayPal.
The closest thing here is probably Zelle, but at least with my bank's app, the interface is a bit of a pain. This basically is just another form of what the parent commenter said; how much do I value my own time and convenience compared to what I'd be getting?
Before people read too much into this, just be aware that Ariely has been caught out a number of times falsifying data or even making up entire studies that he then writes about in publications. Not saying this was the case here, but you'd want to look for corroboration in sources not involving him. TFA mentions a few, but most of it is from Ariely.
If they are genuinely only using the information to detect bad actors and maintain site stability as the affidavit states, and if they can prove it, this seems like potentially a non-issue?
I am not a lawyer, but site stability seems like a GDPR "Legitimate Interest" in my book anyway.
The GB Operator will let you dump photos from a Game Boy Camera as well as stream video from the camera in real time. It's a fun little device.
They'd promised a webcam driver, but that never materialized and instead just gave instructions on using OBS to use the video stream window as a camera.
I would genuinely like to know more about these supposed users who are side loading things and getting hoodwinked. It seems high enough friction that you have to have something of an idea of what you're doing to begin with. Everyone I've known who is side loaded anything has been reasonably technical.
My dad on the other hand, who worked for Control Data in the 1980s regularly installs some of the scummiest apps imaginable, and they're all from the Play Store proper.
Launchers that don't actually launch things and serve ads. Apps that launch full screen ads while you're doing things saying your device is infected. Absolute trash.
Like maybe just maybe put some energy into going after the stuff in the Play Store first. As the Play Store exists now, it is unsafe.
Have you seen those YouTube videos of people punking scammers? Scammers will convince people to drive to Target, buy gift cards, and read the credentials out over the phone. Those same people can surely talk you through tapping out a dialog flow.
That's presumably why there's a lockout period - it keeps a scammer from reasonably holding the line until they can pressure you to finish it.
> Have you seen those YouTube videos of people punking scammers? Scammers will convince people to drive to Target, buy gift cards, and read the credentials out over the phone. Those same people can surely talk you through tapping out a dialog flow.
...if the scammer can get the victim to physically drive to Target a buy a bunch of gift cards, what makes you think they need to install anything on your phone? Having RCE on a human is more useful than RCE on a device.
Their deception often relies on remote-controlling a PC, modifying a bank balance to show a fake number using basic "inspect element", and convincing the victim that they "accidentally" received a refund that's too high (often by having the victim type out the "refund" amount in their notepad-looking "refund system" and adding a couple of zeroes).
By making the victim believe that they're to blame for this innocent worker losing his job, they convince these people that they need to go outside normal financial systems to get the money back before anyone notices. Alternative scam scripts also have scammers pretend to be government officials threatening with fines and lawsuits, but the end goal is often to get into the victim's bank account in a way that the victim will tell the bank that everything is fine when fraud detection systems catch wire transfers or suspicious behaviour.
If the victim at any point opens up their official banking app, which scammers cannot control, they'll see that they never received the supposed "refund". With banks moving more and more functionality to apps, scammers can't pull the same tricks if they don't have access to your phone.
Scambaiting Youtubers have shown to be able to throw scammers of their guard by doing the most basic things. Disabling "inspect element" and cmd.exe will stop a scammer right in their tracks, because suddenly their phone script doesn't work any more.
If the victim needs to wait a full day, they'll be more likely to talk to someone. There are plenty of interviews with victims where they will say they realized their mistake hours or even minutes after it's too late. Stress and constant pressure is one of the primary means scammers employ to prevent people from thinking rationally so their obvious and ridiculous lies don't get spotted.
While I think developer verification is monumentally stupid and won't stop any serious scams, I do believe that the timeout measure Google makes people jump through does help.
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